Anne-Marie Slaughter talks to Antonio Mora

Antonio Mora: Two years ago, you wrote an article that became a media sensation and turned you into a media sensation. It was titled "Why women still can't have it all." Did you ever expect it would strike that kind of nerve and have the reaction it got?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: I think no one did. In fact, the week before the article came out, The Atlantic was trying to book me on various shows and essentially wasn't getting very far because people were like, "Oh, this has been said. This has been done. This is nothing new." I just caught the wave. And I think I caught an intergenerational wave where there were lots of young women who had been thinking about this. And I kind of validated them. 

And what you were facing was that you were near the top of the Washington political establishment. And you faced a choice; either get promoted and have an even bigger job, or go home; your husband and kids were in Princeton. How hard was it for you after working so hard all your life to make that choice?

Very. I mean, it wasn't hard to go home after the two years. If you're a professor, you have a two-year public service leave. And I had planned to do that. 

The harder decision was to decide I wasn't going to try to go back in, because my party's been in power now six years, it'll be eight years in 2016. And to decide not to try to go back in in 2012, that was really hard. But I just realized that I was going to miss the last two years my older son was in high school. If I tried and succeeded, I'd have to go back to Washington. And that was where I really thought for the first time in my life, I've always assumed my career won't come first. But I won't have to compromise, I'll make it work. And this was where the two just collided. 

And you acknowledge that you had the choice which was something which is a luxury that a lot of people don't have. That brings up the question. Is too much being made of having it all? Because especially if you look at men. In traditional sense, men really have never have it all. So is it fair to even ask the question?

Well, so the first thing to say is, I was not writing about me. By any standard, I have managed to have career and a family in ways that have worked. What I realized was that had been because I had had this very flexible life as an academic. But even so, I'm not complaining. What my experience made me see was that for millions of women, it just isn't possible to combine work and family in the way they expected, which brings us to having it all. My title would have been, 'What changes need to be made so that more women can stay in the pool and rise to the top?' That's not exactly catchy. And have it all just meant women could do what men could do. Well, one of the things I've realized since is absolutely what you just said. Women looked at men in the '60s and '70s and said, "You've got a family because I take care of that family. And you've got a great job."

Men often looked at women and said, "You know, I'm locked into being a breadwinner. If I want to spend more time with my family, I don't really have that choice." So I don't think either gender has it all. I don't think it's possible to have everything. But I think we could get to a much better balance for women and for men.

What can we do so that both men and women have the ability to really be able to have their careers and at the same time be involved parents?

One is just much more flexibility at work. When I'm the boss, I say, "If family comes first, work will not come second. It will come together." And I let the people who work for me do what they need to do, whatever they need to do to take care of their families. 

The second is we just need to rethink the arc of careers. There's plenty of time to have a family and rise in your career, as long as you're not expected to do both at the same time. But we have this idea that 40-year-olds and 50-year-olds, if you weren't promoted, you're passed over. That's crazy. And we're also missing out on a ton of talent that we need. And then the last thing is just a public infrastructure of care. We are one of three countries that doesn't have paid maternity leave. We don't have high-quality, affordable day care. We don't have any of the things we need if you really believe that care is important.

Let's start with that one. Important to value caregivers and care in general, but can our economic afford it? Are we set up to make that kind of change? 

Well, if you're talking about paid family leave, we are the only country in the OECD that doesn't have it. So there's absolutely no way that you could say we can't afford that. That's a value choice, not an economic choice. But the second point is, again, if you think about the kind of people we need in the workforce, you want the talent that is coming out of schools and going into the workforce and getting trained.

If you want to keep all those people productive and in the workforce, you have to make it possible. So the way to think about it is not "Can we afford it?" It's "Can we afford not to do that?" and it's to think we need to invest in the next generation. Because the other point is we now know zero to 5 shapes a child's brain in a way that affects the rest of his or her life. And yet we're paying the people who care for our babies the same we're paying for the people who care for our dogs and park our cars. That's not an investment that will make us the country we need to be down the road.

And your first point was flexibility. I know in some businesses it might not work as well. But how can we move toward allowing that. And I guess why haven't we moved toward it? 

In every industry there are companies, there are law firms, there are consulting firms who are getting it right, who are really experimenting. The answer to your question on flexibility is, "Try it." Let people figure out how to get their work done and attend to their families. There are countless ways we can make this work if that's our goal. 

For politicians on both sides of the aisle, family values is typical. They all use it as a catchword. They all use it in their campaigns. But is there the political will to make the kinds of changes that you're talking about, to establish maternity leave. No paternity leave either, is there political will to make those kinds of changes?

Well, as the number of women grow in the Senate, you are already starting to see people pushing family oriented legislation, greater support for childcare, greater support for paid leave. So part of this is getting the people who have traditionally been the caregivers into public office. But I think that it also includes much more engaged fathers. And one of the things we are seeing is now 66 percent of men report the same degree or higher of work/life stress as women. So I actually do think the political support is there. I think we have not ever framed the issue as an issue of national investment. It's frankly national security in terms of taking care of the next generation and making sure we're competitive. But also it's just an issue of, wait a minute. What kind of society are we? There's a political action committee for just about everything. There's not for taking care of each other.

There are more women in Congress and the Senate. But the growth has stagnated. In fact, it's really stagnated when it comes to top jobs in corporate America. 

We've been stuck at 20 percent for about two decades. And my answer to that is, we've gotten about as far as we can go for the women who are either wealthy enough, lucky enough or simply superhuman to be able to make it and have families, too. But you're not going to get much higher than 20 percent. And those 20 percent again, they've got enough money to hire people to take care of their children. They are lucky enough not to have had children that had special needs of various kinds.

We're not going to get any further until we give women the same support structure that men in those jobs have. If you look at male CEOs, you do not find male CEOs who are primary caregivers. They have a spouse who's the lead parent. And I don't think you're going to get women into those jobs until they have a spouse who's the lead parent. But that means changing the role of a lot of men.

And what do you say to Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, who wrote the book "Lean In"? One of the things she actually says is that women don't dream big enough, that's there's an ambition gap between men and women.

She and I disagree on that. I mean, I totally support a lot of the advice in "Lean In." I just see countless women who leaned in for all they were worth. But on their second child or a child with special needs or a parent who is sick or a divorce or having to move away from their families, whatever it was, suddenly they tipped over. Suddenly, they couldn't maintain it. And for those women, we need much, much more. 

Two years after you wrote this, are you more hopeful, less hopeful?

I'm more hopeful. I actually think there is change afoot. But I think we need another wave of this revolution that will be pretty much as big as the one we've gone through, this time changing the role of men as much as it changes the role of women.

On international affairs, one thing that you have written in a very thought-provoking way about is when nations should intervene. And one interesting thing you raise is sort of this difference between legality and legitimacy and that sometimes countries have to intervene, even if they don't have proper legal authorization. What do you mean by "legitimacy"?

I should start by saying I'm a former president of the American Society of International Law. I taught international law for many years. I do believe in the value of international rules. And I think you see it immediately today. If Russia can invade Ukraine and nothing happens as a matter of international law, well, the next thing you know, another country will invade a country without the sanction of the Security Council. So rules are critical to upholding international order. That said, we have a global system. It was designed after World War II to privilege the five victors of World War II — Russia, China, France, Britain and the United States. And my proposition is we need to get past that particular arrangement. That particular arrangement is not going to take care of the security problems we face in this century. Sometimes you have to change rules. You have to break rules in order to change them.

So the U.S. acted legitimately in Iraq?

No. What I said was the day after we invaded, I said, "This is illegal." It was clearly illegal. I said, "It could be legitimate if we found weapons of mass destruction, we were greeted with open arms by Iraqis and we went back to the U.N." None of those three things happened. I think it was both illegal and illegitimate.

So you needed all three steps? 

Ideally, yes. At least two of the three.

So again going back to what you were saying about the veto power and the Security Council; you need authorization from the U.N. to make an action in a foreign country legal. One of the five powers may have an objection and may veto it. So how do you make any legitimate action legal?

There's the Kosovo model. In Kosovo, we had been looking at war in the Balkans for five years, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, rape, the works. And finally when Serbia then moved into Kosovo, we thought, "We've seen this movie before. We're not going to let the Kosovars be driven out of Kosovo."

Russia was going to veto a U.N. action. NATO went in anyway. So the first thing to note is I do not support unilateral intervention. If you can't get some serious number of countries to go with you through a real regional organization, and I don't mean that you set up with a couple of your best buddies. You need a group of countries that say, "We think this is so serious. We're going to take action." And then you need to prove that that was the right thing to do so that when you go back to the U.N., there is approval.

But even that takes an enormous effort and sometimes won't succeed. I know you supported stronger action against Syria when the Syrian civil war kicked in. To this I mean, we couldn't even get the Brits to agree at that point last year that it was time to move in and do something against Bashar al-Assad after he'd used chemical weapons against his own people. So even getting a coalition in many cases is very, very hard to do.

It wasn't NATO that you needed there. The point is to get the countries in the region. They're the countries that will be most affected by the use of force, either directly or indirectly through refugees, through population protests, all of that. 

Because part of the problem is that intervention is often needed early in order to be effective.

Absolutely. At this point, you know, even I look at this and think, "How on earth are you going to stop this?" I still think that action against Assad himself could force him to the negotiating table. But I'm not even sure who else would be at that table at this point. Because three years on, it looks very different. And it's going to be four years now.

Because the moderate Syrians seem to be minimal at best in their strength and number. And so if you go after Assad, are you not then helping ISIL?

And if you go after ISIL, aren't you helping Assad? I mean, Syria has fractured and fractured into many different pieces. And it is infinitely harder to figure out how you would broker some political settlement. And this is what Assad wanted. 

He wanted to portray himself against terrorists.

Precisely. But we knew that was happening before a Jabhat al-Nusra or an ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] even existed. We could have acted. But we would have had to take very bold action. And we would have had to have support in the region. And we would have had to try to force him to the table when there was somebody to negotiate with.

And since we're in the Middle East, I know you supported the action in Libya. Tom Friedman of The New York Times wrote a column saying that decapitation didn't work in Libya, which is basically just getting rid of [Muammar] Gaddafi, that democratization didn't work in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood, that abdication, which is what we hoped Assad would do in Syria didn't work there, either. That we tried invasion, occupation, who knows what else we've tried in Iraq, and none of that has worked. Is it hopeless? Is there nothing we can do in the Middle East to help?

I think you have to ask compared to what? So if you want to look at Libya and Syria, Libya is in deep trouble. But when Gaddafi was still there, all the predictions were that Libya was going to devolve into civil war between the Benghazi, Tripoli and the other parts of Libya where Gaddafi had effectively held three part of Libya together.

So there was the predictions that Libya would have become exactly what Syria has become. For all the trouble in Libya, it's still a functioning state. It's got lots of trouble. We did lots of things wrong. I still think the Libyans are better off than they would have been had we not intervened, had Gaddafi been allowed to do what Assad did and just fight for years and years and years, first point. Second is these things do take a long time. 

And you think the strategy against ISIL is the appropriate one?

It is simply essential. I mean, you cannot actually allow this organization, that setting, people as barbaric as we've seen, redraw the borders in the Middle East. I think it is radically incomplete, however to attack it as a purely military problem and to attack it as if it were not completely and intimately bound up with the Syrian Civil War and the politics of Iraq and increasingly, the politics of Turkey. So we need the political strategy together with the military strategy.

But do we need more force?

I'm not sure we need, I mean, if we need more force, we need more force from the region. This I do strongly agree with President Obama that the United States has to use force in a way that has lots of partners. And the way we used force in Libya was right, where the United States provided some absolutely critical assets.

But we were not on the front lines of the air campaign. And then there wasn't a ground campaign. So to the extent we need more force, it can't be the U.S. parachuting troops in. On the other hand, if the U.S. demonstrates the will... people will come together in a coalition. The question is no one knows what the U.S. is really willing to do. They know we're willing to protect ourselves. But they don't know how long we'll be there to support others. And that's critical.

Madeleine Albright put it pretty simply, "The world is a mess." And you know, Obama has faced very harsh leadership criticism for his leadership, for leading from behind people say that his enemies don't fear him, that his allies don't trust him. You wrote, "Blaming Obama for all the world's ills is like blaming a Caribbean island for a hurricane." But you also wrote that "if the U.S. meets bullets with words, tyrants will draw their own conclusions." So how do you reconcile those two thoughts?

The first thing is I do think that President Obama is encountering more crises at one time than anyone in recent memory. He's got the Middle East in flames. He's got Russia with Ukraine. He's got China and Japan and Korea and the South China Sea.

And then on top of that, he's got a global pandemic that could be as terrifying as anything we've witnessed. That's leaving out a bunch of other smaller crises. So I really do think that to blame him because the world is a mess, that just crazy. I do think that his failure to follow through on the use of force when Assad used chemical weapons and Obama had drawn that red line did really make many people wonder, was the U.S. prepared to stand up for things that it says are absolutely critical?

I think that introduced an element of uncertainty. I don't think though that you can say Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had Obama been stronger. I don't think you can say, "ISIL would not have arisen." I mean, that's just those are counterfactuals. 

So when does the U.S. need the intervene? Do our vital interests need to be at play? And when is an interest a vital interest?

There's a clear, vital interest where, the defense of our homeland, the defense of our people, the defense of our allies, all of those are things where we're prepared to use force. I think where I may differ from many traditional foreign policy people is I do think that if the gap between what we say we stand for and what we do becomes too wide, we are irrevocably weakened in the world. That we can stop saying we stand for universal human rights.

We can stop saying we stand for democracy, that we'll stand with people who fight for their rights. But as long as we're saying it and as long as we're standing up and saying, you know, "We fight atrocities. We sign the genocide treaty. We will defend people against crimes that are against humanity." My view is, at some point, you've got to make good on what you say. And if you don't, you've lost your reputation, your capital, your identity as a nation. 

I'll ask you the same question I asked you about women in the workforce. Are you hopeful that this mess of a world that we're living today, that things will improve?

I don't think you can be an international lawyer, at least by training and not be hopeful. Because what you see if you study international law is that it does take decades and even centuries to establish these rules and to cement them so that the rule we have less war in the world now than we've ever had before. That may not feel like it. But we actually have less than we ever have before. More human beings are living better and living longer than ever before.

We have rules against war. Until the 20th century, it was perfectly fine for any nation to invade any other nation. And no one would do anything. So I am optimistic. But I do think it depends on the great powers taking joint responsibility, not only for peace among each other, but also for a minimum standard of human rights, of wellbeing for the world's people.

The United States has to lead those nations. We really do. I still think [we are] the single nation who has the biggest role to play. But we can't play it alone. And it means our marshaling that consensus among other great powers, not just the ones who won World War II, but the new powers of this century as well.

This interview has been edited and condensed.